


Part II: Light and Gold

by pensandbirds



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Scorpius is the most precious, exploring those "father-son issues I have them"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 06:56:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7791334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensandbirds/pseuds/pensandbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Godric's Hollow, Scorpius Malfoy found gold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Part II: Light and Gold

Scorpius Malfoy grew up knowing his mother loved him. Astoria surrounded her precious son in light and love, delighted at his eager smiles and adoring eyes. He was named for the constellation that conquered the night sky while the sun shone longest and brightest. His mother chose his name in his father’s family tradition, but she was deliberate in choosing a constellation from when the night was shortest and the day, king. 

Scorpius grew up amongst books. In the quiet, shadowy expanse of the Malfoy Manor (so many rooms were closed now, against bad memories and shame), the library beckoned, a challenge and an offering. A young Scorpius ran his fingers over gilded spines, dark runes, polished wood. Peeking through the shadows was the heavy shine of gold. He pulled down leather bound tomes, teetering on his heels, and climbed his way into a black horsehair chair, pausing every few pages to push himself back to keep from slipping to the floor. Dusty pages created delicate storms of motes in the beams of light from the high mansion windows. 

Scorpius felt like one of the books on the climbing shelves; to his mother, he was a beloved, treasured volume. To his father, Scorpius was sure he was some boring and forgotten tome on a shelf, but one given by someone the recipient cared enough about that they would feel bad discarding it.  
(Draco loved the boy too, but hidden, closeted away to be taken out only occasionally, carefully palmed, but placed back with only thoughts, no words. Draco had not yet found the courage to open and become acquainted with this most prized volume.)

Scorpius embodied his mother's light, her quiet fighting spirit. He also had something of his father, some long hidden attributes that might soon be unburied.

***

Astoria placed a bag of sweets in Scorpius’s hand and a more brightly colored ditty in his head, and then he was on the Hogwarts Express. She had promised that the sweets would help him find someone, other bright souls, to be friends with. Scorpius believed her. And he believed, beyond anything else, that his mother loved him. He wrapped the light from her eyes into his mind like the sweets, and tried not to think that her body was as frail as the paper those shining bits of sugar were wrapped in.

(Draco had once been so loved by a silken haired mother that she had put herself at great personal risk to find him again, given up everything she had once pronounced to wish for the one thing that would still her heart in this time of distress.)

But when the door to the carriage shut, Scorpius felt the shadows creeping towards him from the eyes of every student around him. Rumors flew on the wings of hissed whispers. Scorpius sat alone. 

So when a boy with dark hair and edges he couldn’t quite manage and a girl with fire burning within her, Scorpius was dying to share some of the light he was worried would be extinguished. 

***

The Hat cried Slytherin when it touched another white blond head, as it had for generations before. It whispered knowledge of fathers and grandfathers that made Scorpius shrink. Malfoys were Slytherins. Gilded in gold and silver, garnished in emeralds. 

But the Hat truly saw Scorpius's ambitions, labeled them such when the boy himself might not have: to see what his mother saw in his father. To understand how he was both of them, the two of them, no other combinations. The Hat saw something else, too, something that made it think of blue and bronze for a moment, maybe something that would offer gold. But that fraction of a moment ended and it called out Slytherin, to no one’s surprise. The faces staring back at Scorpius said they were sure they knew him, knew what he was and what he wasn’t. Green and silver on his robes simply confirmed it.

(Scorpius knew what he was, maybe. He was light and joy and insecurity, but he also had his father's hard skin, sharp points when pushed, when he was feeling right, when he knew something. Injustice and lies were not worthy of his mother, made of light, but there was enough gold to sharpen into blades.)

***

When Scorpius first heard dementors spoken of, it was through another uncomfortable, stiff dinner with his grandparents. Lucius and Narcissa were still as craftily poised as they had been their entire lives, excepting the year it all almost fell apart. The conversation was a mistake: Scorpius had answered Narcissa’s question about his recent activities with an accidental flood of excited reports on his books, his thoughts of how awful that Azkaban prison must have been when they still let dementors control it.  
Draco froze. Astoria lowered her fork to her plate slowly, a piece of pheasant still on it, untouched. Narcissa’s lips melted into a thin line. Lucius’s eyes burned. “Yes, it was,” he said, patting his mouth with a silk napkin. “Draco, perhaps you remember where children sat when we had guests join us during your school days?”

(Scorpius would encounter dementors too. They came from a hellscape of a world, where his best friend never existed, his heroes dead, his father disappointed. His grandfather’s disapproval washed over him.

Scorpius would be saved by another Patronus; he didn't know how his would have appeared.  
If he did, it would have come from the thought of the safety of the arms of someone he loved, from all of his adventures with Albus, from that delightful experience of feeling wanted. Feeling needed.)

***

For two years, the first day of September was both a prison sentence and a release. The train itself was his respite: a quiet compartment, the excitement of seeing Albus again, the heart-fluttering chance to see Rose as she traipsed down the corridors.

Third year, he felt nothing. The light had gone out of his world.

And then fourth year, Albus wanted him to leap off the train, the moving train, into the water below. Scorpius would have never considered himself brave. He would have considered himself Albus’s best friend, and Albus had determination etched upon his face. 

As he followed his best friend in his ambition for right, Scorpius felt the familiar sensation of snakes in his stomach, constant scales brushing against each other, tied in knots. His anxiety wound its way through and around him, tightening with each twist of the time turner. In every dark corner, he looked for light, something to remind him that they were still running towards something right. 

(Not that it would have mattered, he thought, not when in every possible situation, she was still gone. His mother’s laugh was still just an echo.)

***

Scorpius’s story did not begin in Malfoy Manor. His story began when he made a choice, in a dark forest where he was nearly alone, walking with ghosts. He had created these ghosts, he and Albus, but he was alone now, and he was going to have to deal with them himself, or find someone to help him.

So Scorpius made the choice to turn to his father, and that is where his story began.  
One ambition, achieved. When his father told him to do what he had to, Scorpius saw the first flashes of gold that his mother had once dug up and polished and treasured. 

(Minted gold was what Draco had once seen as the source of power. He had been raised in it, shaped by it, minted himself by gold.  
Scorpius had learned from his books and his friends what made power work: determination, bravery, love, searching for something right. That was power dark lords knew not. But the gold his mother found could have power too. Or maybe they were the same thing; Scorpius could never decide, after.)

And then he broke the surface of the lake again, gasping for air, and Albus was beside him, restored, and everything was as it should be, and better, because the snakes in his stomach were gone. Unanxious. 

And what being unanxious could make him. The snakes in him still coiled, but they no longer tied themselves in knots. 

***  
In Godric’s Hollow, Scorpius found gold.

Seeing Albus rush into his parents’ arms had a profound effect on Scorpius. His father was right; he was more inclined to follow than lead. And so he did, for some split second, following some imaging of his mother there, ready to receive him the way Ginny Potter received her son. But the only one there was Draco, and Scorpius pulled up short.

Until his father offered him what he wanted: affection. More precious than gold. His father held out his arms for the unexplored book that was his son, and Scorpius eagerly awaited to tell his stories.

**Author's Note:**

> This is part II of my character explorations of the new generation in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I was lucky enough to see the show in June, and it has been constantly on my mind since. My interpretations are, therefore, very based on the actors' interpretations of the characters; but then, I think that's something that makes these characters.
> 
> The title "Light and Gold" comes from an album by my favorite choral composer, Eric Whitacre. 
> 
> Stop by pensandbirds.tumblr.com to chat, see more of my ramblings, and find links to my podcast, where I talk all about Harry Potter!


End file.
